Posts Tagged ‘Databricks’

With the recent announcement by Google of Cloud DataFlow (intended as the successor to MapReduce) and with Cloudera now focusing on Spark for many of its projects, it looks like the days of MapReduce may be numbered. Although the change may seem sudden, it’s been a long time coming. Google wrote the MapReduce white paper 10 years ago, and developers have been using at least one distribution of Hadoop for about 8 years. Users have had ample time to determine the strengths and weaknesses of MapReduce. However, the release of Hadoop 2.0 and YARN clearly indicated that users wanted to live in a more diverse Big Data world.

Earlier versions of Hadoop could be described as MapReduce + HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) because that was the paradigm that everything Hadoop revolved around. Because users clamored for interactive access to Hadoop data, the Hive and Pig projects were started. And even though you could write SQL queries with Hive and script in Pig Latin with Pig, under the covers Hadoop was still running MapReduce jobs. That all changed in Hadoop 2.0 with the introduction of YARN. YARN became the resource manager for a Hadoop cluster that broke the dependence between MapReduce and HDFS. Although HDFS still remained as the file system, MapReduce became just another application that can interface with Hadoop through YARN. This change made it possible for other applications to now run on Hadoop through YARN.

Google is not known as a backer in the mold of Hortonworks or Cloudera with the open source Hadoop ecosystem. After all, Google was running its own versions of MapReduce and HDFS (the Google File System) on which these open-source projects are based. Because they are integral parts of Google’s internal applications, Google has the most experience with using these technologies. And although Cloud DataFlow is specifically for use on the Google cloud and appears more like a competitor to Amazon’s Kinesis product, Google is very influential in Big Data circles, so I can see other developers following Google’s lead and leveraging a similar technology in favor of MapReduce.

Although Google’s Cloud DataFlow may have a thought leadership-type impact, Cloudera’s decision to leverage Spark as the standard processing engine for its projects (in particular, Hive) will have a greater impact on open-source Big Data developers. Cloudera has one of the most popular Hadoop distributions on the market and has partnered with Databricks, Intel, MapR, and IBM to work on their Spark integration with Hive. This trend is surprising given Cloudera’s investment in Impala (its SQL query engine), but the company clearly feels that Spark is the future. As little as a year ago, Spark was mostly seen as fast in-memory computing for machine learning algorithms. However with its promotion to an Apache Top-Level Project in February 2014 and its backing company Databricks receiving $33 million in Series B funding, Spark clearly has greater ambitions. The advent of YARN made it much easier to tie Spark to the growing Hadoop ecosystem. Cloudera’s decision to leverage Spark in Hive and other projects makes it even more important to users of the CDH distribution.